eLife is pleased to announce that it has won the OpenAthens UX Award 2025 for its user-driven approach to the design of Reviewed Preprints published under the eLife Model. Award organiser Jane Charlton declared eLife the winner today at OpenAthens’ annual online Access Lab event.
Chris Huggins, eLife's Lead UX Designer
The UX Award recognises publishers and library systems vendors that have developed the best user experience and journey to their content and services. It was established by OpenAthens in 2020 to inspire vendors to invest resources into good UX design and make access to knowledge as easy as possible for end users. The award is now in its sixth year, with previous winners including Cambridge University Press, Sage Publishing, De Gruyter, nkoda and Emerald Publishing.
eLife has been recognised for the user-driven design work that the team has applied to its model for publishing. Launched in 2023, the eLife Model ends the accept/reject decision after peer review and focuses instead on the public review and assessment of preprints. The outputs of the model are Reviewed Preprints that combine the advantages of preprints with the scrutiny offered by peer review.
The eLife team’s usability testing of the first Reviewed Preprints showed that many readers still assumed they were revised and “accepted” before publication, as with the traditional process, and that they found it challenging to tell the difference between the different article versions. The team carried out user surveys and prototype testing that helped them to improve the communication of the status and version of article pages, as well as to make the public reviews and eLife Assessments easier to find, and information about the model easier to understand. It is this work, and the clearly presented evidence of it, that has been recognised by the UX Award.
Chris Huggins, eLife’s Lead UX Designer, says: “We’re delighted to be named this year’s winner of the OpenAthens UX Award. eLife has always taken a user-driven approach to the design of our website and publication process, and this is especially the case for the eLife Model where we’re doing something very different to other publishers. Our team has put in a significant amount of work to ensure the process is as clear and intuitive as possible for all our stakeholders, including authors, readers and other users of the Reviewed Preprints we publish, and it’s a real honour to have our efforts recognised in this way.”
According to the panel judges, eLife scored highly across all steps in the award process and clearly evidenced improvements to user experience. The judges were impressed with eLife’s user research that guided the design process throughout. They say that eLife demonstrated continual iteration and improvement, and clearly focused on the real outcomes and impact on its users.
UX Award organiser, Jane Charlton, explains the importance of the award for the industry: “More publishers and other library vendors are investing effort into designing optimal user experiences because it can lead to increased usage, customer satisfaction and retention. Our UX Award winners are industry leaders in user-centred design, inspiring others to make improvements in this area. eLife clearly demonstrated they are taking user experience to the next level in their innovative approach to public review and assessment of preprints. We congratulate them on their achievement!"
Damian Pattinson, eLife Executive Director, says: “From the start, eLife has invested in integrating good UX design into everything we do as part of our mission to improve how research is reviewed and communicated. As the eLife Model provides a completely new approach to the traditional system, it’s even more crucial to ensure our process is as simple and seamless as possible for all users to navigate. Chris and the team have done a fantastic job in making this happen with the help of their user-driven research both during and after the launch of the model. The UX Award is a testament to the work and dedication that has gone into this so far, and I’d like to congratulate the team for this achievement.”
To read more about the eLife Model, visit https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review.
To view the Reviewed Preprints published under this model, see https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints.
And to read more about eLife’s technology and innovation efforts, see https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/b6a249af/technology-at-elife-10-years-of-innovation.
Media contacts
Emily Packer
eLife
e.packer@elifesciences.org
+441223855373George Litchfield
eLife
g.litchfield@elifesciences.org
About
eLife transforms research communication to create a future where a diverse, global community of scientists and researchers produces open and trusted results for the benefit of all. Independent, not-for-profit and supported by funders, we improve the way science is practised and shared. From the research we publish, to the tools we build, to the people we work with, we’ve earned a reputation for quality, integrity and the flexibility to bring about real change. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Max Planck Society and Wellcome. Learn more at https://elifesciences.org/about.
